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Wikis - (Elham Naseri)
Wikis If you want to find the most important site on the Web these days, look no further than Wikipedia.org (see Figure 4. I). As its name suggests, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, one that really is attempting to store the "sum of human knowledge." By the time you read this, the English version of Wikipedia will house over 3 million separate entries with information about everything from the Aaadonta (a type of slug) to Zzzax (a fictional super villain from Marvel Comics). Every day, new entries are being added about people, places, things, historical events, and even today's news almost as it happens. It's truly an amazing resource. But whereas most people get the "pedia" part of the name, only a few really understand the first part, the "wiki." And believe it or not, that's the most important part, because without the wiki, this encyclopedia, this growing repository of all we know and do, could not exist. The word wiki is a short form of the Hawaiian wiki-wiki, which means "quick." Ward Cunningham created the first wiki in 1995, who was looking to design an easy authoring tool that might spur people to publish. And the key word here is "easy," because, plainly put, a wiki is a Web site where anyone can edit anything anytime they want. So, have some knowledge about your favorite hobby that isn't on Wikipedia? Add it. Read something you think isn't correct? Fix it. Don't like the way one of the entries is written? Erase it. Something big just happen in the news that is history making? Start a new entry. You have the power, because every time you access Wikipedia, or most any other wiki for that matter, you do so as editor in chief. And it's that freedom that has made Wikipedia the phenomenon it is as tens of thousands of editors in chief, people just like you and me, take on the job of collecting the sum of all human knowledge. Most everyone's first reaction to that is that it sounds more like Whackypedia. "If anyone can edit anything on the site any time they want, how in the world can you trust what you read there?" they ask. It's a great question. The answer is that, thankfully, there are vastly more editors who want to make it right than those who want to make it wrong. When mistakes occur or vandals strike, the collaborative efforts of the group set it straight, usually very quickly. University of Buffalo professor Alex Halavais tested this by creating 1 3 errors on various posts on Wikipedia, all of which were fixed within a couple of hours (Halavais, 2004). Pretty amazing, I'd say. Now, I know what you're thinking, something along the lines of "Well, I can skip this chapter, , cause this anyone-can-do-anything wiki thing will never work in my school." But, try t o resist the urge; wikis can b e pretty amazing and versatile. And if you believe as I do that doing real collaboration is something that every student needs to learn, keep reading. Take, for example, the Wikipedia entry created around the Indian Ocean earthquake that struck just after Christmas 2004 and created the tsunami that killed more than 175,000 people. It may have happened over five years ago now, but it was without question the event that made clear to me that we were living in a much different information world as I turned to Wikipedia to watch the event unfold. The earthquake occurred just after midnight (GMT) on December 26, and the first 76-word post was created at Wikipedia about nine hours later. Twenty-four hours after the first mention, the entry had been edited more than 400 times and had grown to about 3,000 words, complete with some of the first photographs of the devastation, a chart documenting the dead and injured, and other graphics describing how the tsunami was spawned. Forty-eight hours after the first post, the entry had grown to more than 6,500 words, had been edited 1 ,200 times, and contained more than a dozen graphics including video of the wave itself. Six months after the event, more than 7,000 changes had been recorded, and the post had settled at around 7,200 words. All of it had been created and re-created by people just like you and me who were interested in contributing what they were finding to the entry. It was without question the most comprehensive resource on the Web about that horrific event. And that process is being repeated over and over as news happens around us. It's how each of Wikipedia's millions of entries in over 200 languages have evolved-from the hands of people just like us with the concept that everyone together is smarter than anyone alone. In the process, we check facts, provide "soft" security by acting like a community watchdog, and weed out bias and emotion from the posts in an attempt to arrive at a neutral point of view for each article. Each entry is the group's best effort, not any one person's. In that way, Wikipedia is the poster child for the collaborative construction of knowledge and truth that the new, interactive Web facilitates. It is, to me at least, one of the main reasons I believe in the transformative potential of all of these technologies. No one person, or even small group of people, could produce Wikipedia, as currently edits appear at a rate of around 400,000 a day. Every day, thousands of people who have no connection to one another engage in the purposeful work of negotiating and creating truth. They do this with no expectation that their contributions will be in some way acknowledged or compensated, and they do it with the understanding that what they contribute can be freely edited or modified or reused by anyone else for any purpose. The extent to which this happens and to which it is successful is truly inspiring.